Posted by: Clayton Makepeace
May 5, 2008
Issue #410

The Secret to Becoming
An “A” Level Copywriter

An Interview with Top Copywriter,
Kim Krause Schwalm

Kim Krause Schwalm is one of the hottest copywriters alive. She has had many red-hot controls – both in the health and wealth fields – and her insights are money in the bank for both writers and the folks who hire them.

So Clayton did a little digging. He got right inside her head and found out what makes this top copywriter such a huge success.

Clayton: Let’s start out with where you came from, your childhood, your family, growing up, your education.

Kim: Okay. I’m the oldest of three children, two younger brothers. My father was an electrical engineer. I grew up mostly in Maryland, but we moved in Florida when I was middle-school age. We lived down there for a few years right on the beach. My dad was working on a project at Eglin Air Force Base. And then we moved to Ohio, which was a big change from Florida, and I went to high school in Ohio and went on to college in Ohio at Miami University.

Clayton: When you were in school, were there any early indications that you had a gift for either persuasion or for writing?

Kim: Well, let me tell you a story about what got me first interested in marketing. When I was in high school outside of Dayton, Ohio and there were several big companies that were based there. There was an NCR, which was National Cash Register, which probably doesn’t even exist today, and then Mead Corporation, the company that makes all the notebooks and the paper products and stuff you see in the stores.

When I was a senior in high school there was a career night, and, you know, my father had always – being an engineer - encouraged me and my brothers to go into like computers or something technical. I mean, we were all really good at math, and, also one of my other best subjects was English. But I went to this career fair being pretty open-minded about the different things that were going on there.

There was this one booth with a sign that said marketing, and there was this friendly-looking guy standing there, and everybody was just ignoring him. So I kind of felt sorry for him. I decided to go talk to this guy and see what this marketing stuff’s all about.

So he started talk – he worked for Mead Corporation. He was a product manager, and he started talking to me about the whole process of researching the market to figure out the need for a product, developing the product, designing it, creating all the marketing for it, and what a great feeling it was when you went into the store and there on the shelf was his notebook.

And something just went bam in my head. That’s what I wanted to do. So I went home that night, and my parents said, “So what’d you see at the career fair - what do you think you want to do?” And I said, “Well, I want to do marketing.” And they were like “Marketing? No, no, you don’t want to do marketing. That’s like sales, and that’s not a good field for a woman, and you’ll have to go on overnight business trips and men will come on to you, and so we just don’t want you to do that. That’s not a good thing for you.”

And I think my father kind of looked at it as if it’d be a waste to go into marketing, because I was so good at math. So he kind of was looking down his nose a little bit at it.

And so I ended up going to Miami University, which had a very good business school. I spent the first couple of years majoring in accounting, and it was just boring. I couldn’t imagine being an accountant my whole life. There’s just no real intellectual challenge.

So I ended up majoring in mathematics and statistics, of all things, because I wanted to learn how to solve problems. I looked at college as a time to just learn a lot of different things and just explore a lot of different avenues – but at the back of my mind, I always knew I wanted to go into marketing. But I didn’t want to be just another marketing major because there was a ton of them, and they all just ended up interviewing for the same kinds of jobs. It wasn’t challenging enough. It wasn’t going to stretch my mind enough to do it that.

I got out of college and ended up settling down in D.C. I found a job at a research consulting firm, and they did economics consulting mostly for the Department of Defense.

I took the research job at this economics firm, because I knew that a starting point for most marketing careers was in market research. So even though this really had nothing to do with marketing, it was a steppingstone, and it was a pretty fun little job.

After about nine months, I found out about an opportunity at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Maryland, which was up in Baltimore. And the reality was I think it had taken them like nine months to get to my application, because I think I had sent them something when I got out of college, and it just took a while to get around to interviewing me. It was for a position in an actuarial department, of all things. I ended up taking that job knowing that they had a big marketing department there. And sure enough, after about a year and a half, I was able to get into their marketing department. That’s where I first learned all about direct marketing.

There was a guy that had been brought in who was a very experienced direct marketer. He was kind of like this one-man marketing machine that came in and really revolutionized what they were doing with their individual market marketing. He brought in direct mail and needed somebody to help him out, so he hired me. I was doing everything, from creating marketing databases to getting my first crack at writing direct mail sales letters.

We grew that department from two people to a separate subsidiary of about 20 people in about three years, and it went from being a money-losing division to by far the most profitable division of the company. It went to $40 million in net profit or something. It was a real success, and we did everything from telemarketing to newspaper ads, to a ton of direct mail, to print ads, so I really got exposed to a lot of different facets of direct marketing.

Clayton: That’s fantastic. And it sounds like copyrighting kind of snuck up on you.

Kim: I got my first taste of copyrighting sitting there in Blue Cross in my little cubical. I’d take my little one-page sales letter into the marketing manager’s office, and it’d be all marked up with red ink. We’d go over it, and I just learned it that way. Pretty soon, I was hiring people and training them how to write the stuff.

Clayton: Were you at that time turned on to any of the classics on direct – on copyrighting or advertising, Hopkins or any of the others?

Kim: No. I didn’t – unfortunately, I didn’t really tap into them until much later, when I was at Philips.

Before I went to Philips, I decided to go to Blue Cross’ business-to-business unit, and got a job as the brand manager. I always thought that was my goal to be a brand manager or a product manager – that it would be my dream job.

But I was miserable. It was a bureaucratic job. I felt like a professional meeting attendee, you know, dealing with all the corporate politics.

Clayton: I’ve seen that a lot of places. People who really don’t understand the selling process try to quantify it, and they try to analyze it because they don’t have the internal compasses to tell them what’s going to work or, you know, what’s likely not to work.

Kim: Right.

Clayton: And so they try to create systems and procedures that they can blame when things go wrong.

Kim: Right. They couldn’t even agree who their customers were. It was just very different from the individual or consumer market where I was going out and talking to senior citizens on a pretty regular basis. You really start to understand who your ultimate consumers are and who’s buying your products and who’s using them and what their biggest concerns are and worries and fears. And that’s so important to every aspect of marketing, not just copyrighting.

Clayton: Yes. Absolutely. So how did you hear about Philips?

Kim: Well, there was this job ad - I think it was in the Washington Post. I never heard of the company, but I went ahead and sent in my resume. And at the time I had been seriously dating a man - who is now my husband - who lived in the Washington D.C. area, so I was looking to relocate about an hour south from where I was living in Baltimore. And I came in and was interviewed.

Clayton: What year was this, Kim?

Kim: This was in 1992.

Clayton: Oh, okay.

Kim: Health and Healing had just been launched I guess, what, about a year or so before that or a year and a half?

Clayton: No. I think it was ’91.

Kim: Yeah. So it was about a year, and there was this hotshot copywriter named Clayton Makepeace who had written this huge control.

Clayton: I hear he’s a real jerk.

Kim: No. No. Everybody was talking about you. You had already grown the circulation to 300,000 or something. I mean it just was this humongous success.

So I came in as a marketing manager, and it was the best possible environment you ever would want to work in. It was so much what I needed. It was complete opposite of this bureaucratic environment that I’d worked in for like the last eight or nine months at Blue Cross and Blue Shield. You could be a total entrepreneur, you could be totally creative. You could come up with products that might have some appeal. And then I would write the insert. So you did everything soup to nuts, and then you’d run it in the newsletter and see how it did. And there was even the whole feeling of, you know, if you’re not failing enough, you’re not trying enough new things, which was very freeing.

Clayton: That was Bob King’s attitude. He loved people who had initiative and creative ideas, and he never punished anybody or thought less of them if that particular idea didn’t hit a homerun.

Kim: Right. And that’s how you get the homerun. Too often, in many companies, you have a lot of people who are just afraid to take risk.

Clayton: And a lot of company leaders who punish those who do.

Kim: Exactly.

Clayton: When you were doing all of this – in addition to newsletter inserts, were you doing solo mailings?

Kim: No, we weren’t – we really weren’t at that point yet, because we wanted to just see how profitable some of these inserts would be. You want to take your least-risk vehicle without investing in the whole separate postage and printing and all that.

So we would mail anywhere from a two-page up to like a six- or eight-page insert. I had this one insert I did - it was one of my first ones – for the Austin Healthmate air purifier. I don’t know if you remember that product?

Clayton: Yes. Yes, I do.

Kim: I think we sold it for $395 a pop. I wrote this insert – it was a six-pager – and it did really well. Then I had like some things that totally bombed like one weight-loss book and diary called "Love Your Fat Away."

Clayton: Sounds like a good plan to me.

Kim: So it was like a science lab, you know. We just tried all these different things. This was in the early stages of the whole alternative health movement and alternative health market. We were just trying to figure it out.

Then someone – maybe it was Bob King, and maybe you had some input – came up with the idea that we needed to start a vitamin business, because what these people really want are vitamins.

Clayton: Ninety days after we dropped our first promotion for Health and Healing and it came in at 4%, Wendy wasn’t even with the group yet. Marshall Hamilton who was the group publisher flew to Atlanta, and I met him there at a tradeshow. And I started working on him to start a vitamin company, and he went to Bob King, and I think there was aversion to it because Tom Philips basically saw himself as an information provider, not a product salesperson.

Kim: Right.

Clayton: So right after that tradeshow, I flew up to D.C. and spent three or four days at Philips. Bob King and I had meetings every day, and in every meeting I was saying, “You got to have a vitamin company, you got to have a vitamin company.” It was three or five hundred thousand subscribers at that point, and we talked about it, and, you know, Bob would always nod his head in agreement, and then nothing would happen. And it was killing me, because I was seeing all that money just falling through the cracks.

Kim: Right. That’s what we were finding, too, in our little research lab of special products. You know, we’re talking to customers, we’re doing surveys. I was on the phone and talked to people. We’d read their letters. You know, you may have read some of these letters, too, from Health and Healing subscribers. The number one letter that we got was “Where can I find a multivitamin that has your formula.”

Clayton: Right.

Kim: You know that’s what they wanted because he had written in the newsletter, “Here’s what you should look for in a multivitamin supplement, you know, these levels of nutrients.”

Clayton: I think that’s what ultimately pushed them over the line, because I nagged until I was blue in the face.

Kim: Well, they finally listened, and they said, “Okay. Who wants to help start this vitamin business?” And I don’t think too many people in our group were that interested, because, again, you get into the whole mindset, we’re a publishing company and this is just a little out there.

So they asked me to do it, and I said “Okay. Sure.”

They made me the marketing director, and I actually came up with the name Healthy Directions. And at the time, it was just Dr. Julian Whitaker. We went out to California and talked with people in his clinic. And he even had a few people that were running like a little vitamin store in the back room – just for his patients at the Whitaker Wellness Institute - and talked to them about what we needed to do to get transitioned. Right from the ground floor, I was very involved with helping to launch that whole line of business. I wrote the initial insert to launch the business. We just launched it by putting inserts in the Health and Healing newsletter.

We started doing backend mailings to people who had bought the vitamins through the insert. We had a whole basically renewal series, the equivalent of a renewal series we put together to get people to keep buying the vitamins. One of the great things about that business is it’s consumable products that people need to become repeat buyers.

Clayton: Did you put together an auto order program at that time?

Kim: Yeah, we introduced that pretty much right out of the gate. We called it personal delivery service at the time. I think it’s called something else now. Cindy Champion also came on board. She was very key. She had been the production director at Philips, and she came on board as the operations director, so she got everything up and going with the manufacturing. So I decided to use her as the spokesperson. We didn’t want the inserts to come from Julian Whitaker. We didn’t want him to be the person selling to the subscribers. So, I just thought she had this great name, Cindy Champion, director of customer satisfaction or whatever I gave her as a title. Within three years, this little business was generating I think $23 million in sales. And all we were doing at the time was just going to the back end of Health and Healing.

And, of course, the main company for all the health publishing at Philips is now called Healthy Directions, and the people there over the last eight or ten or years have really taken it very far.

I was also very involved with helping to launch Dr. Williams’ Mountain Home Publishing or the Mountain Home Nutritionals line and worked with them on that. And then, of course, they’ve launched Dr. Sinatra and a few other doctors’ lines since then.

Clayton: Yeah. Do you have any idea – I can find this out, but do you have any idea what their annual sales are now?

Kim: I don’t, but I’m sure it’s huge. The vitamin business is a great business, and it’s just the perfect fit with the whole health publishing business.

Clayton: I think it’s interesting, you know, for the readers to understand what happened there. This entire process was dumb luck plus killer entrepreneurial spirit.

Philips had tried and failed with three health newsletters prior to coming to Health and Healing. They had had Cardiac Alert and then they had The Scripts health letter, which was from a big health institute on the West Coast.

And then they had had the George Washington University health letter.

And all of those letters were mainstream health letters. They were talking about dealing with your doctor and the drugs you’re taking and all of that kind of stuff, and there was not a word in there about lifestyle changes or alternate therapies or vitamins or any of that. It was just all mainstream medicine. And I wrote packages for all three of those, launched – well, for the launch of George Washington and Scripts and then packages for Cardiac Alert, which was edited by the cardiologist who took care of Tom Philips’ father.

And every single one of them was an unqualified bomb because we were going to a market that was accustomed to buying the Harvard letter and the Berkley letter for $19 to $29 on a soft offer.

Kim: Right.

Clayton: And so we came along and said, “Well, you know, here’s a letter from a less well-known person or organization. We’re gonna charge you $39 up front, hard offer.” And we just couldn’t crack the market. And then David Frankie came along with the idea of an alternative health letter. David was an editorial guy -

Kim: I remember David.

Clayton: - for the health group, and, as I hear it, one hell of a Zydeco dancer.

And so he came up with this idea, and they – and Marshall Hamilton and David found Julian, and so we launched Health and Healing. The response was explosive. Okay. That was the dumb luck part, you know. We found a product that – we had been trying to sell products the market didn’t want. We found a very similar product with just a couple of little twists to it that the market was just crazy for.

Kim: Right.

Clayton: And – but then what happened was just inspired because the Philips’ organization was so entrepreneurial that they followed that. They listened to what the market was telling them and they followed that, and they built a multi-hundred-million-dollar business as a result.

Kim: Right.

Clayton: So it was a fun time to be around there.

Kim: It really was. It was a great time, and I was – stayed with the Healthy Directions business ‘til I guess it was about 1996 and wanted to try my hand on the publishing side of the business after doing the vitamin business for about three or four years. And I went to work with Margie Roth on the publishing side for a little bit, and then I was asked to help launch Dr. David Williams’ newsletter and get that whole vitamin business up and running and working with a team of people to do that. And then I went and launched my first child.

Clayton: Your most auspicious launch so far.

Kim: Yeah. My best. Well, then I had another launch after that, but then I came back after having my first child. I’d been out for about three months, there’d been a lot of different organizational changes, and they’re like “Well, you’re gonna work for Toby Smith now.” Do you know Toby?

Clayton: Yeah.

Kim: Yeah. He’s a great guy. He’s over on the investment side. So that was a really great experience, and it was very different from what I had been doing. I worked over there for about I guess five or six months. I think Toby was kind of figuring out what to do with me and where they were going. They were at kind of a crossroads and this was before they launched all their very successful Internet stuff. And at the time I’d been thinking for a while about trying this freelance copyrighting stuff – it just seemed like the right time to try it.

I’d had a lot of big changes in the past year. Having a child is a huge life-changing experience. About six months before I had my first child, my father passed away.

And it was just kind of a confusing time, because they were making big changes in the group I was working with. I had been offered a non-compete agreement and some other incentives by Philips, which I was really hesitant to do at the time. In the back of my mind, I was thinking if I want to become a freelance copywriter, I don’t want to have anything holding me back.

When I had started to work in Margie’s group, I got to know some of the big-name copywriters that were out there, and I was amazed by what great lives they had. I mean they could be home with their kids when they wanted, they could take time off, and they just really seemed to enjoy what they were doing. And I kept thinking I really should try it.

Clayton: Now, had Peter Bolowski gone out on his own at this point?

Kim: Oh, yes, he had. He had gone – he was one of the people who definitely gave me the idea. He had left probably about a year and a half prior to that time.

So I had been in touch with him, and every time I’d call he would have Counting Crows blasting in the background. He’d say, “Yeah, I worked four hours today, and now I’m taking off.” You know, here I was working these like nine- and ten-hour days.

Clayton: Peter went straight to six figures. He did great.

Kim: Yeah, he did. He was – I remember like six months after he was out there or something I heard that he had like five controls.

Clayton: Yep.

Kim: Yeah. I was like “Wow!” So I’m thinking well, maybe I could do this. You know, I’ve been writing copy in-house and having a lot of good success doing that. Many people were commenting that they thought I was a pretty good copywriter. So I thought I should give a try.

So, when my dad passed away and my job wasn’t clear in the investment group, I thought it was time to leave. But at the time too, you know, I had – I had just hired a full-time nanny who I loved, and I wondered how do I do this and keep my nanny and walk away from a six-figure income?

And so I was talking with a gentleman who had his own vitamin business who did a lot of work creating inserts and other promotions for the Agora Health List, and he put me on a retainer arrangement basically for six months that guaranteed 90% of my income.

Clayton: That’s wonderful.

Kim: And it was okay. That was only going to take 60% of my time, so I could still do other work for other clients, so –

Clayton: Was this straight retainer?

Kim: This was just – really all I did for the first three or four years of my copyrighting career were mostly projects that were not royalty - like mostly backend stuff, inserts, and small mailings and that kind of thing. I hadn’t really worked on that much acquisition direct mail when I was at Philips. I was mostly building the whole backend business. That was really my whole area of expertise. I mean that’s what Healthy Directions was. The vitamin business was basically a backend business for many years.

It was a great opportunity to work with Agora, and I did that for about six months, and then he ended up hiring somebody else to come work for him as a marketing director because he just needed somebody more full time. And at that point, Philips had been calling, and I was basically doing a ton of their inserts and a lot of their other direct mail packages that they send out. That kept me very busy.

The next year, I had my second child. I took two months off that year, and I still made like 50% more than I made working full time the whole year at Philips. So, right off the bat I was increasing my income. I was making more and working less. What more can you ask for, especially when you’re just starting out, a family with young children. Working at home I was able to take constant breaks, take my baby out for a walk or whatever, but then knowing that the nanny was right there. I always knew what was going on. I could come back upstairs and go to work, and it’s just a great arrangement.

Clayton: So what was your first acquisition package for?

Kim: My first – I would say my very first one was for a – you know Dr. Batmanghelidj?

Clayton: I’m not familiar with him.

Kim: Okay. He wrote a book called Your Body’s Many Cries for Water.

And actually Julian Whitaker had written about his book a few times in some articles on the importance of drinking water in Health and Healing. And Dr. Batmanghelidj was a very interesting man. He actually passed away about a year and a half ago, but he was my first client. He would market books and videos and audiotapes. He put together like this whole program, you know, like the water cure basically.

And he was just a fascinating guy. It’s a neat story. He actually discovered the healing powers of water when he was in a prison in Iran - in horrid conditions where they’d have 36 men packed to a 6-foot by 6-foot cell, and they’d have to take turns standing and sitting. And with the enormous stress these people were under, everybody was developing these ulcers. Of course, part of it was bad diet, and they were constantly getting dehydrated, and this is what Dr. Batmanghelidj suspected. So he started giving them water to cure their ulcers, and it was working. So he actually devoted himself to all this research of water. So when he finally got out and he came to the United States, he started writing about this discovery.

So he was writing these books and was, you know, very passionate about belief about the importance of water and most people not drinking enough. He would write all his own copy. He would go to Ted Nicholas’ seminars, and he was actually a pretty good writer. He would write these long direct mail packages that had a lot of his passion in it, but they just really weren’t as strong as they could be from a selling perspective. I wrote a couple direct mail packages for him, and I said, “Hey, let’s try a magalog.” So I got to write my first magalog for him, and it worked really well. Unfortunately, he couldn’t afford to pay me royalties, so I got myself a sample basically. And, more importantly, it was successful in the mail, so I could show that to people and say “Look. I’ve done a magalog that’s worked.”

So then I got a client down in Florida, Rob Reese, at Nature Trade Center.

He sends a lot of stuff under bionutritionals and – or bioceuticals and Swiss Labs and different names. And so he gave me my first acquisition package job for a fee plus royalty. And I wrote a package for him on an OPC product, which is like grape seed extract, and it didn’t work. I think we took way too general of an approach. We were trying to cover everything under the sun. So we actually had another copywriter critique it. I think it was Bob Hutchinson who took a look at it, and I was on the phone, and the three of us went over it, and that was just extraordinarily helpful. We got some other ideas about what to retest.

So Rob and I went back to the drawing table and said well, let’s retest this – let’s zero in on one main health concern. We decided to focus on joint pain, and went out there – I wrote this thing probably in like two weeks. It was like one of the fastest promos I ever wrote because I just had this really clear idea. I had talked to the doctor who formulated it. He had a great story about how OPC had helped him overcome three joint surgeries. It pretty much eliminated his joint pain, and he could get back to all his activities. So it was a great story from the doctor. And I wrote this as a 16-page tabloid-sized magalog, and it became a really strong control. And I think he’s mailed at least four or five million pieces of it, and it’s actually still a control and I wrote the original copy back in 2001.

We mailed it in that same format for three years, and then we did some other format tests. Just recently, the product went through some changes, so I kind of re-launched it with a new promotion that’s doing really well.

Clayton: It’s like six degrees of separation. When Bob Hutchinson was kibitzing with you on that, he was one of my copy cubs.

Kim: I know. That’s what I’ve heard. Well, I had met Bob years ago when I was working with Margie. I was working with Margie on Jay Abraham’s newsletter.

Clayton: Right. I launched that.

Kim: Yeah. And also I think we had a letter with Denis Waitley. And that was just a great experience. You know, it turned out that newsletters probably weren’t the right products for that audience.

Clayton: Yeah.

Kim: You know, the seminars and other things had –

Clayton: No. We could never get the newsletter thing to work for Jay.

Kim: Yeah.

Clayton: In fact, Jay and I spent two and a half hours on the phone the day before yesterday, and we were talking about old times. We’ve known each other since the early ‘70s.

And that package came up. Tom wanted to do more of a serious business letter, and Jay’s best audience has always been the opportunity seeker, the biz-op people.

Kim: Right.

Clayton: And that combination just didn’t work.

Kim: Yeah. Well, yeah, and I worked very closely on that newsletter. When Margie was on maternity leave, I was filling in her shoes temporarily and worked with Jay on the editorial and went out to one of his seminars. It was out in San Diego. It was one of these five-thousand-dollar-a-head seminars, and it was just an incredible experience. I mean I think he would have just stayed up all night and talked to the audience, but he would go ‘til after midnight each night.

Clayton: Is that right?

Kim: Yeah. So back when we worked with you, we worked with Doug D’Anna and Bob Hutchinson. I met Kent Komae, who wrote a really good package for us, and Parris Lampropoulos - I met and worked with him on a package. So these were my first round of copywriters that I finally had the opportunity at Philips to work with because I had always been doing all the backend stuff and been kind of like the copy queen of that and not really working on the acquisition promos. So yeah. It’s like this small little community.

Clayton: It sure is. When was the first time you did a package for a financial newsletter?

Kim: Well, I got a chance to start working with KCI. I’ve never actually really prospected for business. Most people have found me through referrals. Most of my referral people have been people I used to work with at Philips, so it’s been really great.

Someone who used to work at Philips gave my name to KCI, to Doug Hill the marketing director over there, and I started working on some renewals. You know, they were like “Well, can you do this two-page renewal or this or that?” And Doug and I put together a whole huge renewal effort. He called me up one day on the phone. This was for Personal Finance, which is one of the largest investment newsletters out there in terms of circulation. He’s like “Well, we got a problem. We got to do a renewal, but we got to raise the price.” And I said, “This is a great opportunity.” And he’s like “Well, what are you talking about?” I said, “This isn’t a ‘we’re going to have a price rise’ campaign. We’re gonna give everybody a last chance to renew before the price goes up.”

So we started talking about this idea. We put together this renewal effort, a little two-page insert, and it did kick ass. I don’t think I can tell you the results, but it was by far one of their best performing renewal efforts. We had given these people a deadline. So we went back and we said “Well, let’s extend the deadline.” I think we ended up extending the deadline five times. And we thought, "Now, we need another reason. How can we go back again?" So we just kept going back. And I think the best performing insert of all had this headline "Oops! We Goofed." Because it turned out we had actually made a mistake in the previous letter. I think we forgot to put the deadline in. It still did really well. So we went back with a headline "Oops! We goofed," and that one the response just went through the roof.

Clayton: That’s the ‘please take advantage of our mistake.’

Kim: Oh, yeah. How to take a mistake and turn it into a gold mine. And so – and then I think we went back one or two more times after that, so I think we had a total of five efforts in this price rise campaign that generated a huge amount of revenue. I wish I had the figures. They probably wouldn’t want me to say anyway, but it was just a huge number of subscribers.

So, I was having, you know, a fair amount of success with their inserts and stuff, so they’re like “Well let’s let Kim write an investment promo.” And I think actually the first one I wrote was for a newsletter called Wall Street Winners. They had an issue arise with the current editor, and so they couldn’t mail my package. And as it turned out I think it was right before 9/11 anyway, so it probably wouldn’t have been a good time to mail as it was, but – so that was disappointing.

But then they said, “Well, now we want you to try to write a package for Personal Finance.” So I got together with Doug Hill and beat a very strong control by a very well-known copywriter.

Clayton: I think I know who that was.

Kim: Yeah. And so that was very exciting.

Clayton: Just one of the kind of consistent themes in your career so far I think is something that could be very, very helpful I think to both young copywriters coming up and also to the people that hire them, and that is that, you know, so many of us – so many of the younger copywriters are looking for an assignment to write an acquisition package, and as you and I know that’s a monumental effort in most cases.

Kim: It is.

Clayton: And even for A-level writers like you and Parris and Carline, it’s an agonizing four- to six-week process of many, many drafts and very difficult, and yet young writers are constantly seeking – oh, well, let me do this acquisition package. You’re being available – first of all, you established your expertise early on in the backend marketing, and your being available to do the smaller, shorter projects seem to be over and over again an entrée for you that leads to bigger and better things.

Kim: Absolutely. It’s like when I said earlier, when I got out of college and knew I wanted to eventually do marketing, I looked at every job I took as sort of like a step to get to that next point. And you if you’re just breaking into copyrighting, you need to look at it from that standpoint, and –

Clayton: That’s smart because you can throw a rock without hitting a doctor who wants to edit a newsletter or write a book and get famous and make money, so none of these companies are dying for advocates or for doctors to edit their newsletters. They can spin off unlimited numbers of newsletters. There are scarce resources of copy to promote those newsletters.

Kim: Right.

Clayton: And the situation is true no matter who you talk to. They’re starving for copywriters. And it seems to me the best approach to take if I was in their position would be to look at younger writers and bring them on these shorter, backend promotions and copy chief the heck out of them and let ‘em learn. And then when they’re ready, when they see a Kim who’s sitting there with some kick-butt backend stuff really demonstrating that she knows how to make a sale, then it’s time to try ‘em on the front end. And I think, you know, they would – each one of these Philips, Healthy Directions, Agora, Weiss, all of these companies would in essence have their own little copyrighting school just spinning out newsletter inserts, and those kinds of things.

Kim: I think that’s true, and it’s just a great opportunity to work with somebody for the first time, find out what they can do. You know, you’re only risking maybe a couple grand that you might be paying them to write, a two-page insert, and then you may find a diamond in the rough.

Clayton: Yep.

Kim: And I remember – and I can’t remember the woman’s name, she’s actually the first marketing manager at KCI that I worked with, and I worked with her on this promotion for Wall Street Winners they ended up not mailing because of the change in the editor, and she had said, “You know, we think you’re a diamond in the rough.” And this was like back in - I don’t know, 2001, so –

Clayton: Not that rough evidently.

Kim: But, you know, they would call me an unproven copywriter, and you can’t let that bother you. Even though I’d been writing copy as part of my job for 15 years, and I’d even had people like Bob King say I was the best copywriter at Philips, but, you can’t let your ego get in the way. I’m an unproven writer to them. I worked on something for Boardroom a year and a half ago, and we were negotiating the fee and everything. “Well, you know, you’re not a proven writer yet.” And here I had already had like – you know, I had like two or three controls under my belt with other big companies, but to them I wasn’t proven.

Clayton: So, you know, I think the first time I really heard your name in the context of, you know, top-level writer was – it was connected to that personal finance promotion. And what did you call it? An Issuetorial?

Kim: It was an issue log, and I want to just make one other point on that. It came back to me that before I got that grand-slam winner on personal finance, I actually had worked on another magalog for personal finance before that - my first acquisition effort, which apparently did not work. I don’t know if it totally bombed, but it didn’t work, and they gave me a second chance. And see that’s what Rob Reese at Nature Trade did with the OPC. The first effort didn’t work, we got some ideas, said “Well, let’s try it this way.” It became, you know, a four- or five-year control.

Clayton: Right.

Kim: So I think another lesson for a client is not only to take a chance with somebody who you haven’t worked with before and give them a small project to see what they can do. But even when they try one of these bigger projects – I think there are very few people who are gonna just hit a homerun their first time at bat, so give them another chance, especially if it’s on the heels of just writing that first promo. Everything’s still fresh in their mind. It’s kind of like you said in one of your E-zines about, you know, sometimes you like to write two or three packages right at once for a product because as soon as you’ve finished that first one you come up with a better idea for the second one.

Clayton: Right. And Eric Beutel told me once that – actually this was when I was exclusive with Weiss, and I brought Eric in to write a promotion for a new newsletter product we were launching because I didn’t have the time to do it, and it was a soft offer publication, so Eric was the obvious choice. You know, he’s like the god of the soft offer at Rodale.

Kim: Right.

Clayton: And so I brought in Eric, and we had spent a day brainstorming with the owner of the company in attendance. Eric said, “This first package I’m gonna write for you isn’t probably gonna work very well.” He said, “The second one will work a little better.” And he said, “On the – by the third one we’re gonna be hittin’ the fences.”

Kim: Yeah.

Clayton: And he says, I want you to have a realistic expectation here because” – and Eric’s point was excellent. He said, “This isn’t just about writing copy. This is about the chemistry between me and your people, the process of getting copy through your organization, the quality of the research, and how well we hit the market.” And he said, “Each project we do together we’re going to get a little bit better at each one of those things, and by the third one generally in my experience we’re hittin’ grand slams.”

Kim: Right.

Clayton: And darned if he didn’t do it. It was just exactly like that. His first one was okay. As I remember, it was slightly over 100% ROI on the test. The second one did much better, and by the third one he was in the high hundreds in terms of ROI and doing quite well. And that third package was written like two or three years ago, and they’re still mailing it today.

Kim: Oh, that’s fantastic.

Clayton: So – but, you know, when it comes to longevity of packages some of the stories I hear about you just blow me away like on that – I mean how does one in the rapidly-changing financial markets – you know, how does one write a multi-year control for an investment newsletter?

Kim: I have to credit Doug Hill over at KCI. He had the idea of trying an issue log format. They had actually had some success with that format I think a couple controls prior to that that Doug D’Anna had for a while, and so it was a proven format for them. And what it is, basically, is a magalog. I think it was a 20- or 24-page magalog, but it looked like – it had the issue masthead on the top - the front page. It didn’t have like a cover with big, huge print and lots of color and all that. It didn’t look like advertising. It looked like an issue. I mean it had a big, compelling headline, it had a sidebar on the side, we had bullets on the back cover with you get inside. But, other than that, it looked very much like an issue log, and this was back in – I believe it was in 2002. I’m having a hard time keeping all my years straight. That’s what happens when you start to get older, you know? But –

Clayton: The mind’s the first thing to go.

Kim: Yeah. A terrible thing to waste. But anyway, it was not the first time they had done it, but it was still kind of different out there in the mail. And the copy was written – I wrote the copy – more topical. You know, you would start with a topic and then you kind of get into the lead story, then you would start, obviously teasing about the premiums and getting people interested in the premiums. We had focused on three key trends that had set up with four opportunities. I think we had three or four opportunities that we talked about. And then those opportunities set up the premiums, the one-year premium. Okay. And then we had - I forget - maybe seven more, or maybe five more two-year premiums that you could get if you went for two years. So I had to keep it updated because, after a while, one of the many different headlines we had was like the post-election shock. The election was old news so you had to come up with something else. I was constantly testing different headlines and leads, and we had to constantly keep that updated.

Clayton: How long did it mail?

Kim: It mailed for a good year and a half, I think. In 2003, the editor, Steven Lee, left KCI to go start his own newsletter, which is now called The Complete Investor. And so in preparing for this change of editorship Neil George was taking over as the head editor. The very smart people at KCI decided to hire the copywriter that I had originally beaten with my control to write a re-launch package and retire – prematurely retire my package. So, of course, I wasn’t too happy about that, but what could I do? So they ran this package that this other copywriter wrote and it did okay, but about a month later they’re knocking at my door saying “Can you update your control for this new editor?” So I did that, and I had to change maybe about 40% of my package, but pretty much keeping the same format and the same whole idea behind it and a lot of the copy that I really liked like in the close section. And we went out, and I beat this copywriter a second time.

Clayton: That’s great.

Kim: I had it up until June of this year. That same copywriter got the control back. So it mailed for a good, I’d say, three, three and a half years as a control.

Clayton: That’s fantastic. So what’s more important to you when you write a winning package - the fun of beating a good control or the money?

Kim: Well, obviously the money is important, but I think still at this point in my career it’s the fun of getting another success under my belt.

That’s really motivating me. I’m comfortable now. I mean we live a really nice life. If I never made a penny more than I make now a year, we’d be doing really well anyway. You know, we’re happy. I wouldn’t mind having a much bigger house, and, yes, you know, I mean money is definitely a motivator to some extent, but I think right now it’s just – it’s just fun to reach that next achievement, achieve that next goal. I’ve just always been like that.

Clayton: Yep. You know, I found that too. When I’m writing copy – and Gary Bencivenga and I were talking about this. I think the money was more of a motivator for him than it is for me. I think it’s the ego boost at each step of the process, the client’s response to the first draft, what it’s gonna feel like to see it designed, and then what it’s gonna feel like to get that phone call saying you just beat the living crap out of a great control.

Kim: Right.

Clayton: And I think that’s more tangible to me for some reason than the fact that yeah, well, this package has a potential to make me three or four or five hundred thousand dollars in the next eighteen months, you know.

Kim: Yeah, but going out to your mailbox and finding checks there –

Clayton: Yeah.

Kim: - you know, for stuff you didn’t work on in maybe the last year –

Clayton: Right.

Kim: - is just great. You know, the first time I went out and got a royalty check you know that old Dire Straits song “Money for Nothing”?

Clayton: Yeah.

Kim: Get your money for nothin’ and your checks for free. Obviously it was your hard work and creativity that generated that check, but still it was like wow! Because for the first three or four years of my copyrighting, freelance copyrighting career, every job I wrote I had to get it done and get the check and that was it. But then to start getting that residual income –

Clayton: That’s wonderful.

Kim: - coming in and then have it exceed more than 50% of your total income, that’s really nice. But the other part of it is you can’t bank on it, either, because life is so unpredictable. I mean, the attacks of 9/11, obviously, was horrible time for mailers. There are just a lot of things that are totally beyond your control. And then of course, your client can go hire another copywriter who’s gonna beat your control, and you just never know when that’s gonna happen.

Clayton: We talked about the personal finance package, and that really is extremely well known in the industry and well respected, and I’m sure it was a launching board for you for many other offers from publishers. Could you tell me a little bit about other packages that you have out there now or have had out in the last year or two that have done well for you?

Kim: Well, sure. I started working with Sound View on some projects, and I’ve had the opportunity to work with Parris Lampropoulos. He works with them as a copy chief with all their copywriters. So that’s just been a great learning experience, and working with Garret Wood’s been wonderful.

The first project I did for them was for their cholesterol supplement, and the first effort did really well, but it didn’t beat the control. So we went back and did a retest with a different headline and a different lead, and it beat the control by a pretty wide margin.

So I got a control with them for their cholesterol product, and then they asked me to work with them on a promotion for their women’s health newsletter called Women’s Health Letter, and I have not had a health newsletter control before. I’ve written maybe one or two efforts, but it had been quite a while since I had worked on something like that. I mostly had been just doing promotions for health nutrition, you know, nutritional supplement and for financial newsletters. So it was a great opportunity to work with them, and I got a very strong control on the first test that we did, so I’m pretty proud of that.

Kim: I have another promotion for them for another nutritional supplement that’s about ready to go out in the mail. I can’t talk about that. That’s a new launch for them. And I also worked on a package for Boardroom. I think I wrote this probably a good year and a half ago. It was my first package for them, which was for their Tax Hotline newsletter.

Clayton: Yes.

Kim: And we did a full issue, which has been a very strong format for their Bottom Line Personal and for their Bottom Line Health newsletters. The person who has that control is Parris Lampropoulos, and it’s a number 10 package. It’s one of those packages that I like to call sort of like a stealth package, because it doesn’t look anything like direct mail. It looks like a letter from the IRS. Are you familiar with that package?

Clayton: You know, I’ve heard about it. I haven’t seen it.

Kim: Right. They’ve had countless copywriters go up against over the years, and no one’s been able to beat it or really even come that close, so it’s been a very good package for them and for Parris. So I guess it was almost two years ago they asked me to write a package for that, and so I wrote this full issue, and it turns out that it pretty much tied Parris’ package. I only have to beat it by 15% or more, so I got a retest opportunity. And then by the time I did that and we got all the results on that, I got the control for that, so I was very excited. And I’m actually the first female copywriter to have a control with Boardroom if you can believe that.

Clayton: Do you think being a woman has been an obstacle in any way in your career?

Kim: In my career?

Clayton: Yeah.

Kim: Yeah, I do.

Clayton: Copyrighting career.

Kim: But not in copyrighting. No. I think that’s one of the great things about copyrighting is I don’t think people care if you’re male or female or black or white or purple or whatever. If you write copy that gets them results, that’s what they care about. And you need to be a good person to work with and all those other good things that go along with just being a good businessperson. I don’t think it’s hurt me at all in my copyrighting career. If I can get results for people, they’re going to want to hire me, and that’s how it’s gone.

Clayton: Yep. That’s my experience too. And watching Carline as well, you know, it’s all results based.

Kim: It is.

Clayton: It really is.

Kim: It’s like one of the few careers out there that’s truly results orientated, you know. And I always had this Pollyanna view of the business world that if I just did my job really well and I just kept doing all the things that I would get to the top. But, I think there is still a bit of a glass ceiling out there for women in the corporate world, and there’s just a lot of stuff that goes on at the higher levels that doesn’t really have too much to do with merit. It has to do with a lot of other things like politics. So that’s what’s great about this business. It’s just completely free of politics; it’s completely based on how well you do your job.

Clayton: Tell me about what you perceive in your approach is different from or better than what you see in the mail.

Kim: Are you talking about how I attack a package or just in terms of the copy that results?

Clayton: Some of both.

Kim: Okay.

Clayton: You know, your thinking – your thought process in approaching the work, in choosing your theme, and then also in the actual components of the package.

Kim: Okay. I think one of the things I do that maybe not all the copywriters do as much of as they should is I do a ton of research, and I find stuff sometimes that can just totally drive the theme of the package. For example, when we did this retest for the cholesterol product for Sound View, I came across a study on cholesterol-lowering supplements that showed how a lot of them have as little as 4% of what’s on the label. I just based my theme on that, and it turned it out to be a very strong control. That fact was the driver for a really great theme.

But also just in terms of the proof elements that you have - again, whether it’s a financial investment newsletter that I’m selling or a nutritional supplement you really need a lot of proof element, and it’s going to make your argument that much more convincing. I mean it’s one thing to just make a claim, but if you don’t back it up with proof element, people are going to be like “Yeah, right.” You know, I think that’s a lot of what Gary Bencivenga talks about.

So I do a ton of research. I try not to really even think too much about what theme I’m gonna take until I really get a lot of research done, because that’s going to drive it. Like right now I’m starting on a promotion for a brand new nutritional supplement that has like nine different ingredients in it. It is an immune-boosting formula, and so my first step is to narrow it down to four of them that are kind of a little bit different and exciting, and I’m just doing a ton of research on each of them to figure out which one I think is going to be the star nutrient in the formula. You almost always need to have some kind of start nutrient in the formula when you’re writing a nutritional supplement.

Clayton: That’s really key because you can’t write a specific benefit or headline if you’re trying to cover the waterfront.

Kim: Exactly.

Clayton: You’d end up with a headline like, you know, Kick Your Health into High Gear or something that would be absolutely lame and completely die in the mail.

Kim: Right.

Clayton: I think your example of the joint health –

Kim: Yeah.

Clayton: - panel that you did on a package that had previously failed is a great example of that.

Kim: Right. You want to zero in on one benefit, and then you can broaden, but you want to do that much later. You zero in on that want, that pain, that worry, that fear, whatever it is, that emotion - whether it’s that constant joint aching or it’s the next time oil prices take a dive I’m going to lose my shirt or whatever that fear is. You zero in on that emotion, but then you’ve got to explain the how. For example, with a nutritional supplement it’s a lot easier to get your hands around one star nutrient than if you say “Well, it’s like this formula, and there’s like six different things, and they all work together. They do all this stuff.” You know, I can’t get my arms around that.

But if it’s this exotic new discovery from the Amazon Rainforest that’s been shown in a Harvard study to do this, I can get my hands around that. Then you’ve got the proof elements too.

Clayton: Right.

Kim: So that’s the other thing I look at - what’s got the most exciting story behind it, what has the strongest proof elements, what’s going to help me really build the best case for this product.

Clayton: Great. I think credibility elements are really key right now with the profusion of competing companies, competing packages, and competing claims.

Kim: Right. People are more skeptical than ever.

Clayton: Yeah.

Kim: I mean it’s not like it was 10 years ago, you know. And the baby boomers are hitting 60 now and they’re just a lot more skeptical than ever, and you have to have the proof elements.

Clayton: Yeah. When you’re looking at other peoples’ packages out there and critiquing them, it’s easy for us to be fans of other writers and look at a package and go “Whoa! That’s cool. I would have never thought of that.”

So what are the things that you’ve seen when you look at other peoples’ packages that you think could – boy, if I could just take this copy and spend an hour with it, I could bump the response?

Kim: Well, sometimes they’re too ho-hum. They’re not keying in enough on an emotion. I talked about how important it is to have those proof elements and all those things that appeal to the rational mind, but what’s really going to grab somebody and start them reading is going to be their emotions.

Clayton: Yes.

Kim: And I know you talk a lot about this. And it’s like when I get your stuff in the mail, and I don’t know if you’re even writing that much stuff anymore, but I have like a file of stuff I’ve collected over the years that I know is from Clayton Makepeace.

It’s emotion. Let me just pull my file out. I think there’s like stuff like "There’s a Devil in the Dow."

Let’s see. There was one about The Slaughter of the Lambs or I don’t know.

Clayton: Slaughter of the Stock Market Lamb.

Kim: Something like that.

Clayton: Yeah.

Kim: You read that and you’re just like “Whoa!” I mean you just get in the emotion right there. And you don’t always have to pound somebody over the head like that, but on the other hand if you’re not tapping into some resident emotion, you’re just not going to get them going. And it’s funny, I just came across a book the other day that I had read in college for a philosophy class called The Rationalist and it talks about – it’s got some writings from three different 17th Century philosophers, and there’s one – Spinoza. Have you ever heard of Spinoza?

Clayton: Yes.

Kim: He wrote this whole huge book on emotions - the whole theory of emotions and opposing emotions. I remember reading this in college and just being really fascinated with it. And when I pulled it out, I thought this is something actually every copywriter should read because it’s got like every possible emotion explained, every human emotion and the opposing emotion. His theory was if you feel one emotion, the stronger you feel that emotion, you’ll feel that opposing emotion just as strongly.

Clayton: Yes.

Kim: You know, like the proportion to which you might love somebody is the proportion to which you have had the capacity to hate them.

Think about that if you’ve ever been through a divorce. I mean fortunately I haven’t, but it’s –

Clayton: I actually had that experience.

Kim: Right. I totally loved this person once, and now I hate them more than anybody, you know. But it’s true. You’ve got these emotions and these opposing emotions, and he describes emotions as confused ideas. So if you think about your mind – it’s like you got this steel door when it comes to facts. If somebody wants to challenge my mind with making some kind of claim about this supplement works 200% better than any other, that would be a crappy headline, but just for example. Then you’re going to say "Yeah, sure. Show me. Prove it." It’s like this steel clamp on the door that’s not letting anything come through because it wants the proof. But if you hit somebody with a really strong emotion that they can feel - that they relate to - it’s like a confused idea. It’s like having the fortress with this little back door that’s been left open and anything can get in and out. You can get in a lot easier that way -

Clayton: That’s the truth.

Kim: - with your confused idea, by tapping into that confused idea. So, that’s how you’re going to get somebody to read a promotion. You’re going to get them interested that you’re talking to them. And, you have to do a lot of different research to get to that. I mean, there’s the research you need for the product that you’re selling, but it’s very easy to get like overly caught up in all that research. I’ve made this mistake before, and I see other writers do it, where you want to explain everything there is about that product because there’s just so much good stuff you’ve dug up,. You really have to narrow it down to what your big idea is.

Clayton: Right. And keep it focused.

Kim: And keep it focused.

Clayton: So, Kim, on the emotional side, you know, I’ve talked a lot about the importance of connecting with the resident, dominant emotion or a dominant resident emotion in the lead copy to create readership. But, there are really three functions in a package where that dominant and resident emotion writing comes in. The first is to make the connection on the front end, but the second one is a credibility element. If you’re writing about something horrendous that’s going on right now and you write about it in a dry, academic way, it’s loses its credibility.

Kim: Right.

Clayton: If you find out that a particular drug for cholesterol is triggering an epidemic of heart failure in this country, the appropriate emotion accompanying that message brings credibility to it, and the appropriate emotion for that message is outrage.

Kim: Right.

Clayton: And so the proper use of emotion in sales copy can be a credibility element. And as you’re doing that, you’re actually doing more than establishing credibility. You’re also creating a relationship between the reader and that figurehead that makes the figurehead an advocate for the reader because the figurehead can express this emotion of outrage on the behalf of the reader, and that makes him the reader’s champion. So it’s a beginning of a relationship between the two of them. And then, of course, the last way that it’s very helpful is absolutely instrumental to making the sale. As we’ve discussed so many times, 99% of all of the purchases made in America are made for emotional reasons, not for logical, practical, pragmatic ones. And so at the time when you’re asking for the sale, the appropriate use of emotion is kind of the grease on the skids that helps push the prospect over the line and helps him make the decision to go ahead and do what’s required to make the purchase.

Kim: I couldn’t agree more.

Clayton: All right. Let’s see here. Let’s talk candidly just you and me and several thousand readers and clients. But I know firsthand that copywriters can drive clients up the wall, because I’ve been a client and I’ve hired copywriters.

Kim: And I have too, and I remember those days.

Clayton: And – but I know also as a copywriter that clients sometimes drive me up a wall, and sometimes there are obstacles or there are elements in the relationship that are obstacles to creating great copy. And I was just wondering if you could tell me a little bit about the things that you think clients could do to help us get them better copy quicker.

Kim: Okay. Well, I’ve been fortunate to work with a lot of great clients, and I’ve had very few that I would say that I would never work with again. And, you know, one of the things I really like is when I can really kind of get a good synergy going with one of them. Like, for example, with the work I talked about earlier with Doug Hill over at KCI, you know, we could just kind of build on each other’s ideas and, then I could just take it and run with it. So that was a really good synergy. Another thing that’s helpful is when they’re really specific early on and honest about what they were looking for. This was more important earlier in my copyrighting career, but that way I don’t waste a lot of time going in the wrong direction only to have to make a lot of changes later. So that’s good stuff.

The number one thing that drives me crazy is when a client takes too long to get back to me with feedback.

Clayton: Yeah.

Kim: You know, I don’t know if that’s every happened to you, but –

Clayton: Yeah.

Kim: Most of the people I work with these days I can get feedback within a day or two, and that’s ideal, because I’m totally focused on it at that time. It’s all fresh in my mind, so, if there are any comments or changes, I just want to get it done.

But I’ve had experiences in the past where I submit a copy and not heard anything for like two weeks or three weeks - or even longer. And it’s like I’ve totally forgotten it. I’ve had to move on to my next project. You call me finally and you’ve got these changes, and you want me to turn it around again, and it’s just really hard to kind of get back in. You feel like you have to get back into your groove, learn everything about what you were just doing, and that just totally drives you nuts. Plus it screws up your schedule.

Clayton: Do you do all your own research or do you sometimes ask your clients to provide research for you?

Kim: Well, I always ask my clients to provide what research they have, and then I always do some on my own, too, because that’s when I can find some really good nuggets out there.

If it’s a financial newsletter, obviously I want to get back issues of their promotions. I like to always get customer testimonials and actual customer letters and other correspondence that they have. And sometimes I’ll call and interview subscribers and customers.

Clayton: That’s a great experience. I had the opportunity to visit with a client a month ago, and he had flown in probably 20 of their customers who were doing video testimonials. And I was able to sit in a room with these 20 people for an hour and just listen to them as they told their story, their experience, with the product. The questions that were most intriguing to me were why hadn’t you ever tried anything like this before? What were your first feelings when you encountered the actual product? And what was the fate of your life at that time? And then now tell me the step-by-step experience with the product as you saw it producing these benefits in your life.

And on this particular product, it was an investment product, and so it was beautiful. They painted pictures of total poverty and - actually one guy had lost his marriage over financial things. And then they told this story of how skeptical they were when they were first confronted with the product and how the price just seemed outrageous and how they just didn’t believe it could do the things that they were told it could do. And we ended up with probably 10 case studies that just by themselves will sell the product. There’s not much else you have to say about it.

Kim: Yeah. It’s amazing what you can find out talking to customers. I remember when I was working at Healthy Directions, the vitamin business at Philips, and I called up some of the people who had written in letters. There was this woman I’ll never forget. I think her name was Bernice, and she was like 82 years old, and she was talking about how she goes out dancing every night. So that was a headline that I used, and I used her quote, and, it was great.

And then when I was just recently working on the Women’s Health Letter promotion, I must have talked to at least – I don’t know – at least a dozen or two subscribers. It’s hard to catch people on the phone. You have to make a lot of calls to actually get to somebody and then, you know, get the right rapport going and they’re willing to talk with you. But I actually got one of my headline ideas from one of the people I talked with.

Clayton: You know Dan Rosenthal does that a lot, and not so much from testimonial givers but by talking to clients. He just asks very short questions.

Kim: Yeah.

Clayton: And then he challenges their answers. And so they end up trying to sell him their idea.

And then – and he’ll just be very passive. And then after about a half-hour he’ll jump up and scream “That’s it. That’s my headline.”

And there can’t be anything sweeter in life than charging somebody an arm and a leg for the privilege of writing copy for you, you know.

Kim: Yeah, I remember reading a story along those lines many years ago. I was there at Philips when Gene Schwartz came in to talk.

Clayton: Yes.

Kim: You know, the legendary Gene Schwartz. There was a transcript that we all got afterwards, and I think I’ve seen it actually marketed on AWAI since then. But it was a great talk that he gave, and I think he may have recounted a story about Martin Edelston or somebody who had his whole promotion written from listening. And you got to use your ears, you know.

Clayton: Absolutely.

Kim: You got to use your ears.

Clayton: So what’s the one thing that you’ve done that you would credit with increasing your income as a copywriter the most from the business side? I know writing these great controls for Sound View and KCI and others is the main thing, but have there been any things – anything in terms of how you run your business that’s had a real positive effect on your income?

Kim: From the very beginning, I made sure I didn’t undercharge for my services. I used to charge close to $1,000 a page when I first started eight years ago just to write like these little backend things like the inserts and such. And that was a little bit more than a lot of people were charging, but I had the experience. I’ve been doing this for a while within Philips.

Coming from Philips allowed me to charge a little bit of a premium for my prices, but I think what I was charging people was very fair. And I still to this day know copywriters who I respect a lot who I think do really good work and they just undercharge, and then I don’t think their clients actually value them as much.

I think it’s important to charge a fair and competitive rate and don’t undercharge. I think a lot of people, especially women tend to undercharge for their services. I mean I have a friend who’s a very well known graphic designer. I’m telling her you got to charge more. I mean, even the client’s telling me you’re not charging them enough.

Clayton: Don’t tell her that.

Kim: Huh?

Clayton: Don’t tell her that.

Kim: Yeah, ‘cause she’s my good friend, and I want her to charge more.

Clayton: Well, I like her too, but I want to hire her.

Kim: Well, I’m gonna tell her to make sure she doubles her rates.

I remember one of your calls you were saying some woman that works with you doubled her fees and she booked up her schedule. I was thinking that sounds like a good idea. I think I’m going to be working with Clayton soon. Maybe I’ll have to double my fees.

Clayton: It’s true, you know. The secret to making high six figures and seven figures in this business is to write a control and then be unavailable.

Kim: Right. I really hadn’t increased my fees in probably two or three years, and I had six people waiting to get on my dance card for later in the year, and I said, “Okay. You know, that’s fine. I’ll get back to you as soon as I figure out what I’m charging.” And I upped my fee for everybody, and I’m now booked pretty much through the end of the year.

Clayton: That’s fantastic. Well, I know you’re booked through the end of this year, because I was only able to get one slot.

Kim: Right, so – but I’m looking forward to working with you. That’s going to be great.

Clayton: I can’t wait.

Kim: Yeah. It’s gonna be wonderful.

I don’t know if you want to squeeze any of this in, but we were talking about the different mental processes and the research that you do and talking to customers. And you need to stay in touch with what the market is thinking and what people are doing. It’s a lot easier when you’re work in the business and maybe you can have focus groups or you have things where you interact with customers, but when you’re a freelance copywriter, you really have to make those opportunities on their own. Talk to people who buy the products that you’re marketing. Keep in touch with what’s going on in the world. Read the newspaper. Get out in the world and talk to people.

One thing I like to read and I’ve been reading probably for 20-some years are advice columns. It keeps you attuned to human nature and how people think and feel about different things. It may have nothing to do with the product you’re marketing, but it’s just it’s good to understand human nature, to be a little bit of a psychologist in this field.

Clayton: Yep. Absolutely. And watching television, you see these human interest stories and you see how peoples’ minds work and how – you know, all these interesting aspects of, as you say, human nature, the denial most of us have in so many areas and the twisted thinking that’s required sometimes to justify an action or decision that you’ve made.

Kim: Right.

Clayton: It’s endlessly fascinating.

Kim: And it’s like what Gene Schwartz said back in that lecture. You know, here he was living this very elite life on Park Avenue in New York City, but he never forgot the Butte, Montana in him.

He would make a point to see every top grossing movie that was out there and read every best-selling book, and the tabloids - The National Inquirer. To understand the depths to which people were actually willing to believe things was very helpful for him.

Clayton: Yes. Excellent point. Do you have any other thoughts you’d like to share with us?

Kim: Just another thing. As you start to write copy and you’re competing with a lot of other copywriters, one of the things that’s good in this business – and this is probably easier for men than women – you have to be a good competitor. You know, it’s almost like a wrestling match. It’s you versus this other person, and it’s such a small community that chances are you may know this person really well that you’re going up against. I mean I have gone up against colleagues; I’ve gone up against friends. We’re still friends after that fact. It doesn’t really matter who won. But you just have to be a good competitor. You have to be – you have to want to win and you have to be able to lose gracefully.

Clayton: Yeah. I think you’re right. I think men tend to be better at that than women. I think maybe part of it might be hormonally related, but I think the other part of it might be the way we’re raised in school. You know, we’re pushed into competitive sports very early on, and using your wrestling analogy, you find yourself in junior high school on the mat wrestling your best friend, and the loser doesn’t go away and cry and yell out “I suck." You’re still buddies, and you’re gonna beat him next time.

Kim: Yeah. My eight-year-old son started wrestling last year, and that’s why that analogy popped in my head, but, he is like the most gentle, sweet boy. You know, he really is. He routinely will just hug his friends. He’s not a tough guy or anything, but you get him on that mat and he turns into an animal.

You know what I mean? I’m just so awed by him. He’s actually been kind of inspiring to me because it’s he gets out there and he wants to win. And ironically his name is Victor, you know.

But it’s just really cool. And then as soon as you’re done with the mats, you go, you shake the opponent’s hand. And that’s the way I look at it. I’m going up against a good friend and, I wish them well. But it’s like if it’s me versus you, I want to win.

Clayton: I’m gonna kick your butt. You know, that’s especially true at times like this too. It’s not just going up against competitors. Every year that goes by, getting a high ROI on an acquisition promotion in the health and investment areas gets more and more difficult because markets are maturing, because of the Internet, you know, for many reasons.

Kim: Right. And it’s a lot more fragmented. There’s a lot more products out there.

Clayton: So what we have to do is not just compete against each other, we also have to compete against maturing markets, we have to compete against any major event that might happen on television. We both know that whenever the news is really strong, people don’t read their mail. After 9/11, after Reagan’s election, during the OJ Simpson trial, after Princess Diana was killed. Whenever there’s major media stuff going on, you’re competing against that. So this whole thing of the mindset of a marketer and a copywriter is that you have to have the heart of a champion. You have to be somebody who’s going to come back from a loss whether you were beaten by a competitor or whether you just missed the market or whether, you wrote a package on how to make money on energy prices dropped.

Kim: Right. And these things happen to all of us. I mean –

Clayton: They do.

Kim: - you can’t just throw in the towel. I could have thrown in the towel many years ago after bombing my first couple times, you know.

Clayton: Yep.

Kim: But even the great ones will bomb occasionally. That’s what always kept me going is I knew from my experience from Philips sometimes they’d hire these really big-name copywriters and sometimes they wouldn’t have a success. And it’s like it happens to everybody so heck, it can happen to me. It doesn’t mean the next time I write something, it won’t be a winner.

Clayton: And the key is to let every little piece of adversity just absolutely get you to set your jaw and swear to God that will never happen again, and you will do whatever is necessary, you’ll pull out every stop, you will not leave one crack for a sale to fall through.

Kim: Right. And that’s a big – that can be a big motivator. Just like we were saying that can be more of a motivator than the royalty checks, you know, the potential royalties. And the other part of it though, too, is you have to have a mindset of abundance out there. I mean, yes, the market’s getting more competitive, but like you were saying, there are plenty of doctors that companies would be launching newsletters and other products for if they could find enough copywriters. I mean, there is so much potential work out there. I don’t have to worry about Carline or someone else getting more controls than me. You know what I mean? ‘Cause we’re all gonna get plenty of work.

Clayton: Right.

Kim: There’s an abundance of work out there. You cannot take a scarcity mindset. I mean there’s just a huge demand for copywriters. It doesn’t mean just because five other people are going to break through that I’m not going to ever work again, so that’s the flip side of it. You want to win, but you want to win for different reasons, and I want to see other people be successful to.

Clayton: That’s wonderful.

Kim: Because there’s plenty of success out there for all of us.

Clayton: Absolutely. Do you have any other points you’d like to cover before we close?

Kim: I think that’s it. We can probably talk for another hour or two, but, you know, I think we have other stuff we got to do.

It’s been really fun.

Clayton: Thank you, Kim. It’s been great.

Kim: Okay. Talk to you later.

Clayton: Okay. Bye, bye.

Kim: Bye, bye.

Yours for Bigger Winners, More Often,

Clayton Makepeace
Publisher & Editor
THE TOTAL PACKAGE™

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6 Comments »

1. Comment by Markus Trauernicht — May 6, 2008 @ 7:29 am

   Lots of wonderful and profound insights between the lines. Thank you very much!

   Regards Markus Trauernicht

2. Comment by Markus Trauernicht — May 6, 2008 @ 7:47 am

   Yep, I keep re reading - it’s fabulous! Thanks again!
   Markus Trauernicht

3. Comment by Leslie Carocci — May 6, 2008 @ 8:50 am

   This was great for me as a first timer. Will have to reread it many times. Thank you.

4. Comment by Randy Kemp — May 6, 2008 @ 12:18 pm

   This stuff is excellent.  What I found very interesting is the comment on Spinoza, and how you can read him, to see what emotions are possible.   And it is interesting this topic covers many items in the holistic health industry.  One of the subjects I studied for many years is homeopathy.  If you give this discipline any credibility – which I do – then to pick the proper remedy, the practitioner must take a detailed history of the emotional and mental makeup constituting a patient, and match it to a remedy, that closely resembles the patients constitution.  So homeopathy would be a good discipline, to pick out emotional triggers, and philosophy (a lifelong hobby of mine), would be a good discipline, to use logical persuasion.  Clayton continues to pick the best, for interviews, and that is why he is king.  I will reread this article several times, to digest all its distilled essences.
   Randy Kemp

5. Comment by Sears Roebuck — May 7, 2008 @ 10:18 am

   The headline should be "How to become an "A" class rich, ethical human being." As an entrepreneur, just reentering the money game at the tender age of 63, I am deeply moved at the ethics exhibited in the articles that appear in The Total Package. This interview is not only inspirational, but practical and useful to me, today. It seems as though this was a phone interview and if so, I would like to purchase a copy. 
   Sears
    

6. Comment by Angela — May 10, 2008 @ 2:19 pm

   Hi Clayton and Kim,

   This has been most useful and inspiring!

   I must work on completing setting up my website which i have found very hard.

   I have found a wonderful organic, local cosmetic product which i am very excited about and this has given me lots of ideas to think about!

   Thanks again.

   PS If anyone is interested my email is a_verley27@yahoo.co.uk and I can send you more information.